Re: Absent Hoisting or a Deeper Problem; A Question about Idea!

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Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 4684

Posted by stephenz
2005-12-09 09:42:50

> It seems to me there’s no way around clutter ultimately other than planning.

Stephen, I’m sure that you are correct; however, some programs provide more flexibility for how you manage your information, which, it seems to me, provides for a greater sense of harmony with that information.

I suspect that how effective each program is for any one user depends upon how much that user feels in control of his or her information. For me, I feel much more in command of Zoot than I do of a tree-based organizer, such as UltraRecall or InfoSelect. I don’t think this is strictly a matter of which program I feel most familiar with, because I used InfoSelect for a full year, and felt very familiar with its controls; but I ultimately abandoned it to return to Zoot, because, to me, the tree-structure just became overwhelming after some time. Pruning is helpful, but that can be somewhat stressful, since you are forced to make decisions about what information might someday be useful, and what can be disposed of.

In Zoot, I can structure my information in a hierachy of folders if I choose, by keywords and categories, by data fields, by databases. And, even information that doesn’t have a virtual home on the Zoot desktop still exists and can be searched for. Searching can be restricted to a single database, or can cross all your databases. It manages more structured information (i.e., information in a formal formal database structure with fields that need to be filled in), or completely free form data. The types of information I can store in Zoot range widely, from random snippets to a catalog of my agency’s catalog of books (we are a nonprofit publishing company). Zoot isn’t perfect, as you can’t print mailing labels and printing of tabular reports, while doable is somewhat clumsy. Without RTF or the ability to store tables and OLE objects, Zoot fails to handle all my data management needs. But it comes very close. But that’s just me.

Steve Z.

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